A Response to Lawrence S. Lerner's Good Science, Bad Science: Teaching
Evolution in the States (Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, September 26, 2000)

The Fordham Foundation's highly touted report by Lawrence Lerner, Good Science,
Bad Science: Teaching Evolution in the States, recommends increased emphasis
in America's public schools on biological evolution--which the report never
adequately defines.1 But the Lerner report fails to point out that students
are being systematically misled about the scientific evidence, and it thereby
encourages precisely the sort of bad science it pretends to criticize.

Biology students should be taught about biological evolution, because the concept
is enormously influential in our culture. But in most of our schools the concept
is being supported with "evidence" that scientists themselves have shown to
be false or misleading.

For example, most introductory biology textbooks feature drawings that supposedly
show similarities in the early embryos of animals with backbones, and these
similarities are claimed to be evidence that humans and fish evolved from a
common ancestor. But embryologists have known for over a century that the embryos
are not most similar in their earliest stages. In 1997, a British embryologist
called the drawings "one of the most famous fakes in biology."2 Yet they
continue to be used to indoctrinate students in Darwinian evolution.

Earlier this year, Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould called the continued
use of these "fraudulent" embryo drawings "the academic equivalent of murder."
"We do, I think, have the right," he wrote, "to be both astonished and ashamed
by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these
drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks."3
Obviously, this is a serious problem in biology education. Why does the Lerner
report ignore it?

Most introductory biology textbooks also use photographs of peppered moths
resting on tree trunks as evidence for natural selection. Dark moths that are
better camouflaged than light moths on pollution-darkened tree trunks are less
likely to be eaten by predatory birds, so textbooks use such photographs to
show why dark moths became more prevalent during the industrial revolution.
But biologists have known since the 1980s that peppered moths don't normally
rest on tree trunks. The textbook photographs have been faked--many of them
by pinning or gluing dead moths on desired backgrounds.

When University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne learned of this
problem in 1998--more than a decade after it was announced in the scientific
literature--he wrote that he was "embarrassed" to find that the peppered moth
story he had been teaching his students for years was seriously flawed. He compared
his reaction to "the dismay attending my discovery, at the age of six, that
it was my father and not Santa who brought the presents on Christmas Eve."4
If a professional evolutionary biologist can be misled for so long by such falsehoods,
then surely it is time to correct them. By failing to do so, the Lerner report
implicitly condones scientific misconduct instead of good science.

The Lerner report also perpetuates the lie that Kansas has eliminated evolution
from its state science standards, awarding that state an "F minus" for "removing
all references to biological evolution." In fact, the standards adopted by Kansas
in August 1999, increased coverage of biological evolution five-fold over the
standards that had been in effect since 1995. Among other things, the new standards
require that students be tested on the details of Darwin's theory of natural
selection. In fact, the wording of the new standards resembles the Lerner report's
own recommendations for higher grade levels. What enraged dogmatic Darwinists
was the Kansas School Board's refusal to tell students that Darwin's theory
explains all major features of living things--something that even respected
biologists question.5

Either Lerner did not bother to read the 1999 Kansas State Science Standards,
or he is intentionally misrepresenting them. Whichever is true, Lerner's report
appears to be just another attempt to promote Darwinian dogmatism without regard
for the facts. Such dogmatism bears a major share of the responsibility for
the current problems in American science education.

In the past, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has made valuable contributions
to educational reform. In this case, however, the Foundation has obviously allied
itself with the wrong people. Foundation President Chester R. Finn laments the
tendency of public schools to "brainwash" children. "Instead of teaching children
to think for themselves," he writes, "students are purposefully led into certain
belief structures of importance to one another group of adult activists. Instead
of being presented with accurate information, they are fed opinions and conclusions."6

The Lerner report contributes to just the sort of brainwashing Finn criticizes.
Lerner wants students to learn Darwinian evolution--without being told that
many textbook "evidences" for evolution have been faked. Lerner wants students
to be taught scientific misconduct masquerading as good science, instead of
being given accurate information and being encouraged to think for themselves.

This stunning failure of the Fordham Foundation to live up to its principles
may be due partly to its reliance on the advice of biologist Paul Gross. The
high-minded language of Chester Finn quoted above is from the Foreword
of a Fordham Foundation article by Gross (quoted in the Lerner report). In that
article, Gross claims: "assertions that 'Darwinism is in trouble with the evidence'
are propaganda," and the Lerner report follows Gross in implying that only creationists
are critical of Darwinism. If Darwinism is not in trouble with the evidence,
however, why is the best-known "evidence" for it misrepresented so consistently
in our nation's textbooks? And why do non-creationists like Gould and Coyne
criticize the textbook evidence? The propagandists in this case are Gross and
Lerner, and they have beguiled the Fordham Foundation into promoting bad science.7

American science education is in serious need of reform. But the Lerner report
is part of the problem, not the solution.

Notes

1. Significantly, on page 1, Lerner asks: "What do we mean
by evolution, and what is its place in the sciences?" His answer: "The universe
is a dynamic place at every scale of space and time." Of course no one disputes
this, and we did not need Charles Darwin to tell us about it. The ambiguous
use of the word "evolution" is a central rhetorical strategy of the Lerner report:
since everyone agrees that the universe is a dynamic place, this agreement is
misrepresented as a consensus on the major claims of Darwinian evolution.

5. The quote from the Lerner report is on page 16; the recommendations
for higher grade levels are on page 4. The 1999 Kansas Science Standards are
at http://www.ksbe.state.ks.us/outcomes/science_12799.html.
On what really happened in Kansas, see Jonathan Wells, "Ridiculing Kansas school
board easy, but it's not good journalism, The [Mitchell, SD] Daily
Republic (October 14, 1999), reprinted on the Discovery Institute website,
http://www.discovery.org.

7. Gross's remark is from his Politicizing Science Education,
cited above, p. 12. The Lerner report on pp. 6-9 and Appendix B, 33-36 states
that only creationists of various forms doubt the evidence for Darwinism.

Discovery Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan, public
policy think tank headquartered in Seattle dealing with national and international
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